Month: July 2007

Just stoking up a bit for Defcon 15 later this week. [Eliot] and I’ll both be there. My personal coffee stash is down to a single selection of Ethiopian Yirg, so I probably won’t enter the coffee wars. (But I might stop by and add some Hack-A-Day swag to the pot for the winner.)

The final speaker schedule looks really good. It’ll be difficult to decide which talks to visit. The DefconBots event should be interesting. I’m hoping to see some original hardware creations.

Looks like wireless cracking is still one of the most popular topics. Hack-A-Day friend [Aaron] of Midnight Research will be presenting the latest on wicrawl.

[sprite_tm] made my morning by sending in his latest work. After opening up his new SMC WSKP100 (Skypewifi phone) to identify the hardware differences, he managed to shrink a flash image from the SMCWSP100 to fit on his new toy. Then he spent some time hacking the kernel from the former to work on his phone. The result? A SIP operational phone that’ll connect to his asterix server at half the price of SMC’s official SIP phone.

This little o-scope is built entirely using valves (tubes), built by [Ian Wilson] and [Hans Summers]. [Hans]’ site covers everything from monitor gutting to a Z80 viscometer, it’s worth taking some time to poke around. Thanks to [Elliot] for sending in this one on the tips line.

[Wolf] sent in this site a while back, and I thought that this frequency meter how-to looked pretty useful. It’s based on an Atmel AT89C52 and a gutted multi-meter. The circuit isn’t too bad. (The worst of it has to be all the display lines.) The Atmel grabs the signal to be measured and drives the display, so the parts count is pretty low.

This one’s pretty simple, but anyone who’s ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]’s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn’t that precise, but it’s good enough to give you feedback on your mods.

[Mike] wanted a better power supply for his argon laser, so he modded some switchmode power supplies. With a few tweaks, he had a few adjustable voltage outputs and a nice solid supply of electrons for his laser projects. If you need a lab quality adjustable power supply for your projects, this is a nice way to get it on the cheap. (He’s in the UK, but the same ideas should apply to us models.

I’m a wee bit of a coffee geek. This roaster was built by [farmroast]. It’s a highly modified of version of the roaster that I’ve been using for the last year or so. A convection oven up top provides the primary heat source, while the beans are spun around in the roast chamber below. A pair of thermocouples let you know what’s going on inside the chamber. When the roast is done, pop the top, dump the beans into the drawer, and a fan mounted below cools them to room temperature in about a minute. It was put up for a home roaster building contest – You might be interested in the other entries.